Slurms Corner…

Hello all!

I haven’t posted all week because its simply been very busy in real life and when I do get time at the computer, I just want to play! I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving holiday and got to spend some quality time with those you love, whether that be spouse, parents, children, grandparents, aunts or uncles, friends, or virtual opponents in the ring of battle. I, unlike others (lookin’ at you Shad!), didn’t take it easy of the eats this year, especially not the Pumpkin pie, of which I at a whole one (not in one sitting of course). Its one of my favorite things, and I only get one time a year to eat it, and its at Thanksgiving. The pumpkin roll came in a close second this year in the pounds devoured, almost had an upset but the pie is still Turkey Day champ, 28 years running. Cake is still > than pie just to set the record straight.

Alright, down to WAR bidness…

This time in Slurms corner, instead of fun links, I have some interesting screenshots. The first of which came during a keep raid we attended in Avalorn. After taking one of the objectives, I jumped down the hill only to find myself trapped under the terrain:

As some of you may know, I have been having some graphical issues with the game since it came out. Its always seemed to simply be a matter of not being able to load the textures fast enough. My worst areas are anything with large amounts of foliage (Troll Country kills my framerate). The killer about this is that I run a 3 gig Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of ram, 2 sata drives in RAID 0 and 2 8800 GT’s in SLI…I know its not a monster Rig, but I shouldnt be having any problems. Well, every time Nvidia comes out with a new driver I get all hopeful (try as I might to suppress the eagerness for the drivers to work like a magic wand). This is what the new drivers did for me after installing them Friday:

Funny thing with the tuxtres is that they changed as you moved, it was as if my dwarf had something funny in his /special pipe.

Not so much a funny screenshot, but I like it:

Me and the Juddster went questing and queueing and I took this while we DOMINATED at the Temple of Isha. I wish I had taken a screenshot of the 500 to 20 score. Whooos hoooouse, Sluuurms hooouse…

Lastly,..

I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ,…er uh, don’t worry about the man behind the curtain, umm OZ HAS SPOKEN!!

See you in game!

Finding the groove…

I think some of us are getting to that point in the game which other blogs I read have already hit on. That point is the great slowdown effect we are facing. Some members of the guild still get on every night (im looking at you Grom and Schmitty!) while others are starting to taper off their playtime. I think I’m falling in the middle. I’m not sure if anyone else in the group is with me, but I have been on every night since the release of WAR. Hard to believe, but on that first night that I ran out to Gamestop and picked it up at about 8:30pm, ran back home and installed to play but maybe 1 hour, was the first of a series of nights that has yet to end. I don’t plan on ending that streak soon. BUT what I DO plan on doing is cutting back my actual playtime, and I think so far its making me enjoy my experience while in-game even more. 

For the past week or so I have been getting a feeling like I’m getting a little burnt out or bored with WAR already, but my underlying love for the game is forcing me to log in every night. I still love running through scenarios, and love ORvR more…when its happening (two nights ago right after I logged in someone shouted that Fangbreaka Keep was under seige and I ran there just in time to thwart the 1 full group of evildoers from their plan to take it….loved it).

The last couple nights I have been playing Left 4 Dead and enjoying myself immensely. If you want to be prepared for the Zombie Uprising, then I suggest you go buy this “game” (simulator is more like it).  Amidst playing L4D, I have still been logging onto WAR, but reducing the amount of time I actually play. I have to say, just logging on for 30 minutes to an hour I think is slowly building up my want to play again, if not at least keeping me interested in playing. I only played long enough last night to finish out my daily task for the Heavy Metal event, then I logged back off. This morning I had that feeling like I had a month ago. That feeling of…man,….I wish I had time to log on right now and get some exp going towards Rank 22.

So whats the message of this rambling? I dont know, I forgot where I was going…oh yeah thats it, the message is:

Find your groove, and you will love the game.

See you in game!

For those about to rock…

And so the next live event begins with todays patch. Im actually somewhat excited about this one. It seems that the team made the tasks pretty easy to do, so anyone with any desire to try out the classes a week before they are available to the open public should be able to obtain the reward. (that means you Marv!)

Im not sure about needing the final reward, but the idea of obtaining a trophy and a sweet looking cloak interests me:

 

On a side note, they have held off on updating the game with the class balances untill after the live event. SO, this means we will see one more patch (1.0.6) before the big 1.1 release. Wait…so then what was 1.1 again? Wasn’t 1.1 supposed to be the game balance/class adding/mail fixing/everything under the sun patch? I guess Mythic figured its best to fix things based on priority. Good thing! You can see today’s patch notes here…

1.0.5 part duex

and the reasons and current plans for 1.0.6 here…

From the desk of Mark Jacobs 

I like that they are re-evaluating the 3 biggest concerns that people had from the initial patch notes. Good news for Runepriests escpecially seeing as your HoTs will now not be touched and the GRANDE HEAL has had its cast time lowered in order to lower the chances of the heal being reduced by combat. So, they turned the nerf,…into a buff!

They are also doing more tests with the Ironbreakers, Bright Wizzies and Sorcerers to make sure that dont over-nerf. I hope they get this all figured out before the new tanks are available for play (since the Black Guard uses a similar mechanic as the Ironbreaker).

In honor of the “Heavy Metal” theme, I plan seting up a nice playlist on my iPod and rocking out as I play tonight. You may even see the return of DJ Slurm over vent.

LETS ROCK!

Oil + Noobs = Slurm FTW!!!

Well the title pretty much sums up my T2 Open RvR experience last night. I was in the midst of questing to get my Engineer to level 20 (which I did, thankyaverymuch). At one point, I had to go from the warcamp in Barak Varr to the camp near the big gate public quest. I saw on the map that there was an option to take a road south and then loop back north through a mountain pass and out to the camp where my quest would end. I also saw that I could simply run through the Open RvR zone and be there in about half the time. Hmmm, risk of ganking vs time save….

I went into the lake and within 2 minutes was jumped by a pair of witch elves who gave me no chance to live.

I figured if I went back in with a plan of being ganked I would stand a better chance (even though bolstered, they were only around level 12, and I should be able to take at least 1 down with me). After re-entering the ORvR area, I happened to see a full group running by the fort on their way to the battlefield objective. I steered clear. I continued onto my original objective to complete my quest and what do i find? one of the Witch Elves. She dies.

I then notice that the keep is being seiged by the group that had ran by moments before. OOH heres an opportunity. I ran as fast as my little drawven stumps could take me and popped into the keep. I then proceed up to the second level and placed my oil above the door (never leave home without it). A few spills later and the whole group goes down. Slurm wins.

Funny thing is: they came back twice and did it again. Yummy XP.

Open for business…

Well, we officially opened our guild doors to newcomers.  We figured with the rate at which our guild rank was moving (we want an emblem!), and the benefit we could gain from for a wider array of classes, that we could add a few scapegoa…er, meatshie…um, assets to our ranks. We are sure to be slow in the expansion proccess due to the nature of our core group. We have been playing various games together for the better part of 6 years now  (wow really??) and are pretty tightly knit. SO, for anyone who happens to come accross this website or the post on the VN Boards (ill link later) heres your invite, just send one of us a message in-game, and well get the ball rolling

Heres a couple facts that may possibly rule out potentials:

No cussin! – Its not that we dont cuss, we just dont swear in game (escpecially not in Vent). Most of us have kids in the background at times and dont want them to overhear.

No drama! – If you start drama, you are kicked from the guild, plain and simple. What constitutes as drama is up to the powers that be (usually its a case by case scenario). If you dont like it…Id suggest not joining. We really want to keep a fun relaxed environment and if anyone feels uncomfortable logging in due to a certain person…we wont think twice about resolving the issue with an iron fist.

No discussion of politics and religion! – We all have seperate views on these subjects and discussing them can tend to lead to arguing which leads to DRAAAMAAAAA!!!. So, if youd like to discuss these topics, feel free to do it in tells, or in a seperate channel in vent, but if it causes the parties involved to become uncomfortable in-game… we will go to fourth down…boot.

Those are the big three, im sure if I forgot something Ill be asked to add it in later.

See you in game!

Halloween contest results…

Here’s a link to all the winners and runners up:

Somethings missing…

Well, no luck this year, maybe we’ll still be around in a year and I can submit a new one. I’ll have to come up with something bigger and better. Heck, maybe I’ll do the costume side of the contest as well….naaaaah. I will say that the winners did a heck of a job, very nicely done, and they probably got about 20,000 Orc face pumpkins like mine which made it less likely to stand out from the crowd.

1.0.4b…

I believe Mythic wants to make certain that 1.0.5 is done right and will test its brains out. But, its seems that there are some goodies that Mythic knew we didnt want to wait for and are releasing them via 1.0.4b.

Heres the patch notes.

-First off it seems that Mythic has taken my suggestion to add more loot bags for keep taking. (yeah im sure it was just me that suggested it AND they read this blog…naysayers!) I say Kudos, I think If 1 full group could possibly take a keep, each member deserves a bag, but regardless of how many people are on the raid, you now have twice the chance at a nice reward.

-Population balance between Scenarios?!?!? YAAAAY! Hopefully this will put them popping on an even keel. I’m actually quite thankful before we get our rerolled characters to tier 3. I played some scenarios in T3 with the Witch Hunter and I can attest that YES, Tor Anroc is the only one that pops during peak hours….and I dont like it. I have had the chance to play a couple of the other T3 Scenarios are they were a BLAST! Cant wait to get the Engineer to 22 and start rockin’.

-And the only other fantastic news was the addition to Rally Masters at all Warcamps….HOORAH! Only question I have is: Are there currently Warcamps in zones that we could not fly to that will now enable us to fly there? (did that make sense?) For example: There is a Elf Zone that we could not fly to as Order, is this now open to us? Because I’d love to do some Questing there, I just never went because it made me feel somewhat stuck there. (I hate running after tasting the speed of a mount). Regardless….this addition of flight paths will surely quell the anger of our grand poo-bah.

See you in game!

Last night was dead…

And I think I found out why…

Everyone was busy?

At least thats my theory right now. I cant get on right now to see the status so I’ll update later, but I assume that the scenarios were dead last night because more people were playing their mains.

Even if this isnt the reasoning for the low scenario pop, it still tells me one thing:

I wanna do stuff like this. Lets get the Juddster’s Runie leveled up and boogie.

See you in game!

1.0.5 goes to the test servers…

Well the big update that most of us have been waiting for is one step closer to hitting our patchers. No, I speak not of the 1.1 patch which will bring us 2 new tanks, I speak of the first batch of class buffs/nerfs. We can now see what Mythic has been working on behind the scenes to ensure a good balance for the classes. Heres the link…

1.0.5

It seems most of the classes got increases in damage to some abilities (some more than others of course) and the only real nerfing that went on was the insta-cast root/snares used by all the ranged DPS classes. The roots now have a longer recast timer, but a decreased AP cost….I don’t really see a problem with this I guess, the primary purpose of this ability on design was to get out of sticky situations, and now it will most likely be used for just that.

Overall I think the nerfs/upgrades seem well done, but I’ll let you guys review the notes and decide for yourself.

*edit* Going to agree with Grom, I dont think DoT ticks should have a chance to expel the AOE Roots, and if they are going to let damage take away a root, they shouldnt have lowered the immunity on it.

See you in game!

Can’t beat the classics…

I came accross this today over at Kean and Graev’s blog AND a similar post at Book of Grudges (great minds think alike), and I’d say I agree:

What WAR Needs 1…

What WAR Needs 2…

Yes, Mythic, we need our gear/tradeskill/exp dungeon back that we used to have with Darkness Falls! This is exactly the type of incentive we need for people to participate in Open RvR.

I even commented one thing on KnG’s Blog about adding not just one incentive dungeon, but rather one for each Tier. I think this would make the idea more viable (due to the games current structure). Overall I think bringing back a Darkness Falls type experience/incentive would be great. It gives the people who clamor for a PvE experience just that, at the same time it gives RvR lovers something to fight for. Your thoughts?

ALSO, in other interesting news – You know that Mark Jacobs is the creative visionary behind WAR and our beloved DAoC (you will always have a place right here *points at heart*). And that he is a VEEERY busy guy (one would assume given his position) but, he actually takes time to…

PLAY Warhammer Online?!?!?!?

I think its just fantastic that he sees the need to actually see what we see every day and come up with some ideas from first hand queues.

 

See you in game!